Earlier this week, Apple launched a HTML5 Showcase page, displaying several uses for HTML5 and related technologies. However, it turns out that Apple is using trickery to block out browsers other than Safari, with the end result that browsers with better support for web standards than Safari can't access the demos.

Silverlight is more than a browser technology, and as it, and WPF converge, it will emerge as the true cross platform programming solution.

Silverlight doesn't offer anything that Flash doesn't. In fact Flash has arguably better support for native apps than Silverlight, since with AIR you can with zero effort create cross-platform binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux. You might argue that for certain use cases Microsoft's programming tools are more capable, but Adobe also has the edge when it comes to design tools, so I'd call it a draw.

Flash however is available on far more platforms than Silverlight and and is more open than Silverlight--open spec and to some extent (Flex) open source. Yet look how much heat it is getting, with Adobe already planning for a long-term transition plan to HTML5.

Will Silverlight support on the web grow before it dies out? Maybe. But as a web technology, it will eventually die out, of that you can be sure.

(barring a miraculous change of heart by Microsoft to standardize and open-source it... )